The Lake House

  72

  WE FOLLOWED the agent’s instructions, our footsteps echoing eerily down the linoleum-tiled corridor. My anxiety level was rising pretty fast now. Visits with the FBI can do that to you, I guess. I’d had bad experiences with them before. Ironically, so had Kit. They’re good people, mostly, but something got screwed up along the way. I guess that’s what happens when J. Edgar Hoover is your daddy. Talk about the road to perdition.

  There were pods of offices along both sides of the hallway, most of them brimming with agents, some in suits and ties, others in jeans and T-shirts. A surprisingly motley crew. Not as uptight as I’d imagined they would be.

  At the end of the hall a slender, blond man in a blue suit was waiting for us. Agent Warshaw, from last night.

  Prick. Jerk. Insensitive asshole. And yes, that was how I really felt about him.

  “Dr. O’Neill, Brennan. Come in. Please.”

  “How could we refuse such an offer?” I said.

  “What did I do to her?” Warshaw asked Kit, who merely shrugged.

  First there was the de rigueur offer of coffee that Kit and I turned down, followed by inane commentary about our drive down, the weather, and the Washington Redskins. Just to establish that we were all on the same side.

  I wasn’t buying it. We weren’t. An old cartoon character called Pogo had once said, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” That pretty much matched my feelings.

  “Where’s Breem?” Kit asked as Warshaw unfurled a cloth wall map of Maryland.

  “He said he’ll join us if he can,” Warshaw said, basically dismissing Kit’s question. “Now, suppose you tell me what you’re looking for.”

  “You already know what we’re looking for. Help. Information. Max knows something that’s pretty scary. It has to do with an unlawful experimental project,” Kit said. “Illegal experiments may be going on somewhere in Maryland. Location fuzzy, name unknown. People, unnamed, are possibly being killed as we get ready to stick pins or whatever in your map. It’s pretty much what happened at the School in Colorado.

  “You know all this. It’s in the report I filed. The problem is—nobody believes Max. Or me,” Kit said, the tension rising in his voice.

  “You’re here, aren’t you?” said Warshaw. “We’re helping you.”

  “Only because I have a little juice left in Washington. Very little. Because nobody is really taking this very seriously.”

  “All right, then, do I understand this much correctly?” Warshaw asked. “Someone connected with so-called biotech experiments wants to shut Max up so bad, they’re willing to kill all of the children to do it.”

  “Something like that,” Kit said. “Actually, I think they’re trying to capture the kids. Murder might be a backup option. The children are valuable. I don’t know why these people want them so badly. It’s driving me crazy.”

  “Come on,” Warshaw said derisively. “Listen to yourself. You have no real evidence, no documentation, nothing but the half-formed musings of a twelve-year-old who is probably under an awful lot of stress anyway.”

  “I tend to agree with Warshaw,” said Agent Breem, just now entering the office. “Why don’t you tell us what you know, Agent Brennan. We need to hear it all firsthand. And Dr. O’Neill, you feel free to contribute, too.”

  “Oh, thanks,” I said.

  Kit could be as compelling as hell when he wanted to be. For the next hour, he filled Special Agent Breem in on some of Max’s scary information. But only some. Seems that Kit didn’t completely trust Breem, either.

  Breem listened without questioning a single point. Then he tapped out several numbers on Warshaw’s desk phone, relayed some information, paused, and said, “Get back to me as soon as possible.”

  No more than fifteen minutes had passed when a blond woman appeared and handed an accordion file to Breem. He looked carefully at the contents.

  I read the label upside down. LIBERTY GENERAL HOSPITAL. What is this?

  Breem said, “You do still have a few friends in the Hoover Building. They want you to have assistance from us, so assistance is what you get. Liberty would seem to be a facility around here that could be the site the girl is referring to.

  “Having said that, you can probably rule Liberty out. It’s a first-class teaching hospital. Hell, Liberty is where the president and vice president go for their checkups these days. It’s the best hospital facility anywhere near D.C. Better than Walter Reed.”

  Kit nodded affirmatively as he flipped through the documents inside the file.

  “Unlike some children her age, Max doesn’t confabulate and she doesn’t lie. She says there’s an outlaw lab in Maryland. Wherever it is, they’re conducting experiments. On humans.”

  “Maybe there are illegal experiments being conducted somewhere, but I doubt it would be at Liberty,” said Breem.

  I saw Kit tense, and a muscle in his cheek was doing the cha-cha. “I understand,” he said. “Thanks for the file, anyway. We’ll be going now.”

  “I really don’t like him,” I said when Kit and I were heading back to the car. “I hate how he talked down to you. Same for Warshaw. Do you trust them?”

  Kit looked right at me. “At this point I trust you and the kids. Nobody else. I figure that everybody else is trying to kill us.”

  I stared at him. “That sounds like something Max would say.”

  “She did.”

  73

  EVERYBODY ELSE is trying to kill us. What a concept. Chilling, and possibly true.

  It was late afternoon when we arrived back at Kit’s place in Washington. I was anxious, hyper, and flat-out scared. So were the children. We spent the rest of the day nervously peering out of Kit’s windows, watching office workers and tourists browse the tony galleries and restaurants around Dupont Circle.

  But as the saying goes, it isn’t paranoia if people really are after you.

  When the offices and shops closed for the night and the street darkened, we made our break.

  One by one, the children slipped out the bathroom window that faced away from the street.

  Six times, the flurry of their wing beats echoed against the brick and concrete of the back courtyard. I held my breath and thanked God that there were no gunshots, no screams. I was beginning to think like Kit about this whole scary nightmare. At this point I trusted him and the kids, nobody else.

  “I’m shaking some,” I finally admitted once the last of the kids was gone.

  “Don’t worry, it will probably get worse. No, we’re okay. So far, anyway.”

  Kit and I waited half an hour before we left the building, then we walked to the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and caught a taxicab. I felt as if we were characters in a movie, a really scary one, the kind I don’t go to.

  We rode in silence as the cab took us south on Massachusetts Avenue for a couple of blocks, past several small embassies and the like. Then Kit hopped out at a red light and disappeared.

  I stayed in the taxi as it turned left onto Sixteenth Street at Scott Circle and continued on to P Street, where I got out. Real spy stuff.

  Kit’s Subaru was still parked where we’d left it earlier. After a few minutes Kit came ambling up with the car keys.

  He gave me a hug. “You okay?”

  “Hugs help. But, nope.”

  We took off to the west, looping and turning, passing right by his apartment again, then heading out toward the zoo. We collected the children from their hiding place behind a Safeway, four blocks northeast of Kalorama Park, and quickly loaded them into the car.

  Mission accomplished. So far, so good.

  “Buckle up,” Kit said. “I mean it.”

  He carried on with his expert driving maneuvers for losing a tail—just in case there was one. This thrilled the kids no end but scared me half to death. We zipped around cars at racetrack speed, backtracked, got off ramps and onto other ones. By the time we had finally eased off the main roads and checked into an idyllic and rustic motel called Alma’s Valley Rest
, in the backwoods of Maryland, we’d surely shaken anyone who might’ve been following us.

  Or so I prayed.

  Alma’s was another funky, bungalow-type motel. We had our own four-hundred-square-foot cabin in the woods, and it was actually much nicer than our bungalow at the Pines. There were two double beds covered with matching powder blue spreads, plus some folding cots and a cable-powered TV.

  To top it off, there was a little brook out back shaded by the spreading branches of several elm trees. What more could a girl ask for?

  I was even starting to like sleeping with all of us in one room. It was crowded, but very nesty, and as sweet as a spoonful of molasses.

  Then daybreak arrived and my storybook fantasy of Princess Frannie, her handsome Prince Kit, and six magical children burned off with the morning fog.

  The hunters were out there somewhere. There was no doubt about it.

  Somehow, we had to stop them before they stopped us.

  But how?

  74

  IN THE END, it was simple, really—we had to hunt the hunters. We had to get them before they got us. There was no other way out of this.

  Kit had managed to cast a spell over the FBI. Maybe he did have connections in the Hoover Building. Anyway, somebody was instrumental in getting us an interview at the Hauer Institute inside Liberty General Hospital.

  Half the kids were fast asleep and the others were watching the Cartoon Network while drinking milk and digging in to a heaping pile of Krispy Kreme donuts when Kit and I left for Liberty Hospital, which we already knew was beyond reproach.

  Once we were on the road, Kit said, “Man, this is one beautiful day,” and it was gorgeous, all golden yellows and soft blues.

  October breezes puffed at the fluffy clouds, sounds of the sixties bebopped from the radio, and Kit sang along with Bobby Darin: “I want, a girl, to call, my owowown . . .”

  Kit has a pretty good singing voice and was giving Walden Robert Cassotto a real run for his money. We were remembering how much we liked each other and forgetting for a little while that this wasn’t the first day of summer vacation.

  Unfortunately, we were headed straight into Max’s nightmare. If not at Liberty Hospital, then somewhere else out there in rural Maryland.

  I couldn’t begin to imagine what these experiments might be like, but if they were anything like what I’d seen at the School in Colorado, maybe I didn’t want to.

  The very “well-respected” Liberty General Hospital was in Carroll County, about thirty-three miles northwest of Baltimore, not far from the Liberty Reservoir. The hospital was so hidden in a cleft between the gently rolling hills of Maryland that we overshot it at first.

  On the second pass, I spotted the discreet bronze sign that directed us off the main road to a narrow lane, then to a wide gravel drive that wound through mature plantings and beautifully manicured grounds.

  “It looks almost too good to be true,” I said to Kit. “Maybe your pals at the Bureau are right for a change.”

  “I don’t have any pals at the Bureau. Not anymore. They all think I’m Mulder, remember?”

  The hospital appeared to be made up of two wings set at sixty-degree angles to each other, like the halves of an opened book standing on end. The three-story-high buildings were made of white stone and had lots of wide windows opening out to a magnificent view.

  I had to admit, it looked totally benign.

  So why did my hackles rise at the first sight of the place?

  75

  AND WHY DID my hackles stay up? Why did every instinct tell me to run from this place as if I were at the gates of eternal damnation? And why didn’t I run?

  Kit lightly touched the small of my back as we walked through the automatic sliding doors that led to a large, open reception area. I needed to be touched right then, to be reassured.

  “I’m okay,” I turned and whispered. Liar. Big fat liar.

  “I’m not,” he said. “I get funny around places where they might be doing experiments on humans.”

  “Not at Liberty Hospital,” I said. “The president and vice president come here for their checkups.”

  “You think this is the place that Max found out about? The Hospital? The Unholy of Holies?”

  “For some totally crazy reason,” I said, “I do. It’s just a feeling, Kit.”

  “Now I’m scared,” he said.

  Morning sunlight blazed across the terrazzo floor and seemed to light the way to a circular granite information desk. There, an extremely helpful and nice elderly man pointed us to a bank of elevators marked THE HAUER INSTITUTE, where we would have our interview. He had our names and seemed genuinely impressed that we were there to see Dr. Ethan Kane.

  The elevator took us down to an underground level and opened onto a small, very tasty-looking reception room. It was thickly carpeted in charcoal gray and furnished with matching upholstered chairs.

  There was a coffee table covered with crisp copies of daily newspapers, foreign and domestic, and magazines. Coffee brewed on a nearby mahogany sideboard. Vivaldi’s Four Seasons played from hidden speakers. Perfect, too perfect.

  But the metallic smell of disinfectant broke the spell for me. We were still in a hospital. No doubt about it.

  “You ever read Coma by Robin Cook?” Kit asked me. “Gruesome stuff.”

  “Stop it,” I said, but at least he’d made me smile.

  “Listen, Kit, I know your FBI buddies set this meeting up, but why do you think the people here are willing to talk to us?”

  Kit allowed himself a slight smile. “Because if they refused, then we’d get really suspicious.”

  “Too late. I’m already there.”

  Kit presented his creds and a letter of introduction to the blue suit seated behind a small mahogany desk. The officious young man made a phone call to a Ms. Analise Miller.

  “Analise will be right out,” said the receptionist, and it was as good as done.

  Ms. Miller was a thin, prim woman in her late twenties. Her dark hair was tightly pulled back in a long ponytail. She was wearing a taupe pantsuit that looked très chic and businesslike at the same time. Her smile was vivid but, in my opinion, feigned, as if her light green eyes had failed to convey the message her mouth was sending.

  She enthusiastically extended her slender hand. “I’ve never met someone from the FBI before,” she said. I glanced over at Kit. Yeah, sure. Like this was such a big treat for her.

  We were led to a different elevator bank. The elevator that responded to our call was vast, with doors on both sides. It had a composition-rubber floor and brushed metal walls.

  The car dropped like a shot to a floor that I suspected was at least twenty or thirty feet underground.

  “Forty-four feet,” said Analise. I believed she could read minds.

  The elevator door opened onto a blue and gray, rubber-tiled corridor, where medical personnel in blue scrubs and white nurse’s uniforms walked quickly in both directions.

  “This is the research area at Liberty. The Hauer Institute is dedicated to carrying on the work of the famous team of Clara and Harold Hauer,” Ms. Miller told us. “They were killed in a tragic car accident outside Boston, as you probably know.”

  I did know about the Hauers. “Sad,” I said.

  We paused in front of a glass-fronted room filled with floor-to-ceiling metal racks. Each held hundreds of cages resembling plastic shoe boxes.

  The cages were alive with dark, rounded shapes. They were lab mice.

  My hackles were hackling again.

  “Our so-called fuzzy test tubes,” the PR lady said brightly. “We do a huge amount of animal testing here—as you can well imagine.”

  Her words triggered a flood of bad memories. Really bad ones.

  I remembered a similar room at the School, that horrific place where Max and the other kids had lived for most of their young lives. There had actually been a Mouse Room like the one I was staring at now, and also a “nursery” of horribly deforme
d children who had been left to die. I would never forget the first time I saw Peter and Oz and Ic and Wendy—the children were cowering in cages and covered with excrement.

  I shook my head to banish the disturbing images. This wasn’t the School, I reminded myself. The president came here for physicals.

  Our escort didn’t see the pictures in my mind, of course. Maybe Analise had some of her own. She led us briskly away from the fuzzy test tubes and down some corridors. We saw rooms filled with technicians sitting at computers. They were probably feeding DNA information into the center’s database.

  We took the elevator down another level and stepped out. The third subterranean floor had laboratory after laboratory filled with shining, modern medical equipment and signs pointing to Operating Rooms One to Six.

  “The Hauers were pioneers in the field of stem-cell research,” proclaimed Ms. Miller. “As I’m sure you know, Dr. O’Neill, stem cells are fresh primary, unassigned cells, harvested from fetuses or from bone marrow. When injected into the body, these cells have the ability to become whatever type of organ cells are required by the body. The cells seem to know where an injury has occurred, and they go to the site of the injury and repair it.”

  “This is all terrific. Really helpful,” Kit said without a trace of cynicism; in fact, he was wearing his most winning smile. “Now,” he said, “take us to your leader.”

  “Dr. Ethan Kane is just around the bend,” said Analise. “As usual, he’s operating today. The man never stops, never seems to rest.”

  76

  THE KILLER NAMED Marco Vincenti wasn’t all that surprised when he got the call to go to Maryland and was told to get there pronto. He had sensed earlier that these particular employers were reluctant to hire too many outsiders, even when they desperately needed a specialist of his caliber, pun intended.

  They had tried it the other way, though.